The Health 202: Hospitals lean into virtual health care even as Medicare won't cover it
CHESTERFIELD, Mo. — From a glassy four-story building in the St. Louis suburbs, doctors and nurses at Mercy Virtual Care Center give checkups and monitor vital signs for patients located miles away — even, sometimes, in other states.
Mercy and other hospitals say virtual care has allowed them to achieve better patient outcomes with fewer staff. The idea is “to meet the patients where they are, as opposed to expecting the patients to come to us,” Mercy Virtual President Gavin Helton told me during my visit last month to the hospital. “To me, that’s foundational.”But every hospital must ultimately be paid to be sustainable, and that’s still an open question when it comes to treating patients with diabetes, congestive heart failure or other serious conditions via virtual care.
Fourteen of the hospitals don’t qualify for telemedicine coverage for most services, under Medicare’s strict reimbursement rules. Of the 110 hospitals where it provides virtual care services, at least several dozen of the facilities are ineligible for Medicare telehealth payments. Helton said the same. “You leverage technology to take limited clinical resources across a much larger area … as opposed to a facility having to hire that specialist, hire that physician,” he told me.. The rate of rural hospital closures doubled between 2013 and 2017 compared with the five years before that, the Government Accountability Office
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